To the READER.

...the more harmful they prove to a beginner who happens to read them. It is certain that they may easily lead him off the right path, but they can never lead him toward the true way.

As for those books that have been translated from other languages, they are of little use when they have been translated to serve some private agenda rather than to be instructive to those who study this science. This is especially true when they have been translated by people who had no knowledge of the terms and operations of chemistry original: "Chymistry". I have no doubt it will be affirmed by all those who (understanding the German language) have read Basil Valentine Basil Valentine was the masked identity of a 15th-century alchemist, supposedly a Benedictine monk, whose influential writings on antimony and alchemy were widely translated in the 17th century. in his own native tongue, that the translation of that volume which con-